Gather round, kids, and make sure you're wearing a special ocular truss to guard against eyeball-socket exodus, because here's a startling exclusive: yes, a seven-second "teaser trailer" for Untitled Robot Franchise Part One, coming 2015. These fleeting frames, with state-of-the-art computerised recreations of buildings falling down, have got us so excited we punched a wall, hiccuped and broke wind. The only way we could possibly be more feverish was if we had 20 seconds of footage! Which, by the way, we will have next week.

The month after that, we've got new "character art", showing what all the actors look like if you moodily Photoshop a picture of them looking dead-eyed in an outfit. Then we'll have a "sneak peek" of a chap who is either the hero's best friend or the main villain played by him off of thingy, who is quite keen to mention Othello a bit in all his identical two-minute junket "interviews". After that, the lead actor will bashfully admit that this franchise was a total dream to work on because in all honesty, when still in utero, he actually used to masturbate over the original comic series. This motion picture event is made by discerning geeks for discerning geeks, you see, and is definitely not anything to do with Hollywood scallywags skilfully playing a demographic like a violin. How dare you imply such things. Get out, and take this tie-in Happy Meal with you.

All right. So there is no Untitled Robot Franchise Part One, and there will be no teaser campaign. But as online outlets become ever more important for spreading the word on a movie, so teasers are becoming ubiquitous. Charitable studios hand out videos, artwork and approved interviews like digital candy. Online editors lap them up. Popular reviews site Rotten Tomatoes hosted 24 pre-release videos about Man Of Steel, 13 of which were under a minute long. The eventual film received a Rotten rating, but never mind that. The wealth of teaser content promoting Friday's Pacific Rim included a three minute, 37 second video, billed by the site that hosted it as an "an INSANELY detailed" exclusive revealing "all of the Kaiju's secrets". Like: they are a bit like giant dinosaurs. That's pretty much it. At least director JJ Abrams had a sense of humour about the hype machine when he teased a "sneak peek" of a scanty three frames of Star Trek Into Darkness on Conan O'Brien. The three frames were duly analysed to death on sundry blogs. On some sites, you had to sit through a 30 second ad in order to watch it.

For sites operating on a minimal budget with a remit of clicks-means-dollah, teaser materials can mean months of lovely free content. I say content, because perish the thought we call it advertising. It's part of a modern, integrated, 360 approach, you steaming great Luddite.